Google Search Gets Recipe View Refinement

Google has added Recipe View, a neat new refinement for its search engine that helps users find food recipes on the Web.

Previously, users who wanted to do recipe searches had to type text searches for dishes, such as beef bourguignon, in the search box on Google.com.

The new Recipe View feature, accessible via the "Recipes" link on the left-hand rail on Google.com, lets users narrow their search results to show only recipes, but also helps users pinpoint the best recipes for their tastes by providing ratings, food pictures (hungry yet?) and other info, such as foods commonly associated with holidays and events:

Foodies can also filter search results based on ingredients, cooking time and calorie count using the recipe refinement options to the left of the page.

Kavi Goel, a second-generation Indian and Google product manager who grew up in the United States, created Recipe View so he can conduct searches for vegetable biryani recipes that include cauliflower and take less than an hour to make:

Even better, see how Recipe View works in this video demo by Google Chef Scott Giambastiani:

Recipe View is rolling out now in the United States and Japan, with support for more countries coming down the pike.

Personally, as someone who enjoys cooking, I can't wait to try this out. I've used Google for recipe hunting before and found it merely adequate. This should make my life much easier. So much for those Martha Stewart cookbooks.

Now for some technical background: Recipe View is based on data culled from Google's rich snippets metadata markup, launched nearly two years ago.

Rich snippets will allow recipe publishers to add markup to their Web pages so that their content can appear with this improved presentation in Google results and in Recipe View.

Google added rich snippet support for events, which include dates, locations and times for concerts, plays, games and other happenings in various cities in January 2010.

That was a flirtation, but this is the first major rich snippet instantiation, said Goel.

"Recipe View is part of our ongoing efforts to enrich the search experience using structured data, and this release is an exciting technical milestone for our team since it's first time we've built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data," Goel noted in a blog post Feb. 24.